This collection of case studies, focusing on British scientific culture during the first industrial revolution, explores the social basis of science in the period and asks why such an extraordinarily rich variety of cultural-scientific experience should have flourished at the time.

The book analyses science and scientific culture in their local contexts, both metropolitan and provincial, examining where possibel the relations between the two, and emphasizing the range of scientific associations in London, to individual savants in the provinces.

This book was first published in 1983.